niceice

Yes it does. He knows how to solve hard problems. Ending the vaste waste, fraud and abuse is a huge spagetti code problem.

It's the opposite. This paints tech nerds as the heroes.

They are fixing our non-democratic government that has been wasting trillions of our tax dollars, while we have increased homelessness, physical and mental health crisis, and other problems that have been ignored for decades.

The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.

The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"

What Musk is doing is what the majority voted for. To finally put an end the unbelievable waste, fraud and abuse. This is exactly what he said he would do and most Americans are relieved and see hope for the first time in a long time.

There's a good chance it will happen, Musk has been pushing for this.

Most of the metrics that matter have gotten worse over the past decades. Under both democrats and republicans. Education, physical and mental health, cost of living, healthcare costs, wealth inequality, I could go on.

When you see all the smart people like Musk, Hotz, Andreesen, Ackman, getting involved and changing their minds, maybe it's time to reconsider your priors too.

A case of being too early? Like the grocery delivery companies that went defunct before the era of Instacart.

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25.

Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical.

Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.

The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.

The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.

- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge

- another built a startup funded by OpenAI

- one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship

- another was a top engineer at a major AI firm

This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds. https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025

Why would bigcorps want employees to know that faking work while getting paid is even a thing?

The entire app is banned. They use a different one called Douyin.

That is still the case and no where else is even close.

https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/468218/nearly-900-million-world...

EV sales are down in Europe generally.

"Registrations of battery-electric cars declined by 9.5% to 130,757 units in November 2024. This drop was primarily driven by a significant decrease in registrations in Germany (-21.8%) and France (-24.4%)."

https://www.acea.auto/pc-registrations/new-car-registrations...

That's more than I would have thought.

What generates that? How much of it is consulting?

That's what he is doing. He designed the department to have an expiration date.

That would be out of character for someone that opened Tesla's patents and lets competitors use the supercharger network.

SpaceX started with a small faction of that, just $100 million.

Would you have disagreed with Ilya about AGI? Or do you just disagree with the cost and timeline?

Ilya reiterated on July 12, 2017, “Each year, we'll need to exponentially increase our hardware spend, but we have reason to believe AGI can ultimately be built with less than $10B in hardware.”

"For the first time, the report delved into race and ethnic data of those who died by euthanasia.

Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity."

Any good hypothesis about this?

A more efficient government helps everyone.

It's quite simply about efficiency.

Then you'll be surprised to learn that the USA is the country that attracts the most international migrants by far.

https://www.statista.com/chart/30815/top-destination-countri...

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42key59cZQ

Dwarkesh Patel

How do you sustain yourself while writing full time?

Gwern

Patreon and savings. I have a Patreon which does around $900-$1000/month, and then I cover the rest with my savings. I got lucky with having some early Bitcoins and made enough to write for a long time, but not forever. So I try to spend as little as possible to make it last.

I should probably advertise the Patreon more, but I'm too proud to shill it harder.

It's also awkward trying to come up with some good rewards which don't entail a paywall. Patreon and Substack work well for a lot of people like Scott Alexander, because they like writing regular newsletter-style updates but I don't like to. I just let it run and hope it works.

Dwarkesh Patel

Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?

Gwern

I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so old that the humidity had decayed the wood. We just got a bunch of scrap wood and a joist and propped it up. If it lets in some bugs, oh well! I live like a grad student, but with better ramen. I don't mind it much since I spend all my time reading anyway.

It was surprising to only recently learn how little money Gwern makes and lives off of.

And then beautiful to see how the internet responded.

https://x.com/Suhail/status/1857102763249004655

Any estimates of how much one of these cost to generate and keep a minute of context?

Secondly, any estimate of how much the price could fall in 5-10 years?

He should be more careful with his words, but they're resorting to cherry picked quotes and guilt by association to mislead:

"appeared onscreen next to"

It's unserious. To get his actual opinion, which is nuanced, you have to go long form.

That's the rational response, but in practice what we saw is that anyone who questioned the Covid vaccine was instantly labeled anti-vax. It didn't matter if they were fine with all other vaccines. It didn't matter if they just had Covid or had a complicating pre-existing condition. Anything less than full acceptance was shut down as anti-vax. They ruined the anti-vax label which was previously useful.

A lot of is the abuse of the label anti-vaxxer. It's being misapplied to people who aren't against vaccine technology.

RFK, who is vaccinated along with his children: "I’ve been fighting 40 years to get mercury out of fish. Nobody calls me anti-fish."

(12 months from now)

We switched from Astro to SkibidiJS

Isn't it still a React problem? They could have chosen to not rely on dependencies and you don't have to add more to it.

Or is it that performance creates a network?

How does that work exactly?